I think my main problem with GotG was that it was trying to be different in light of Marvel’s other movie offerings. This is not snarky, cool Iron Man, or badass, cool Captain America, or rip-rolling good times cool Avengers. This is trying-to-be-funny cool Guardians, and sometimes, it works, but mostly the lines were too cheesy, missed their mark, fell flat.

Overly used 80s-90s pop music to make scenes more cool/emotional is not good.

They tried to force the group to become friends too quickly. The bonding didn’t feel earned. At one point, they actually all said to one other “You are my friend” or “… because we are friends”. I think what the director was trying to do was tell us that this ragtag band who didn’t have friends before, suddenly became friends, and kinda’ each had their own moments where they sacrificed themselves for each other in an altruistic way – so you’d think “hey these guys could be just as cool as Iron Man, Thor, Capt America, Hulk, Black Widow, and what’s that arrow-shooting-guy’s name?”

Groot was really good, though it was alarming that movie-goers who thought he was endearing, sweet and heart-warming because he could shoot fireflies out of his body, give flowers to little girls that grew from his palm, and wrap himself into a tight ball around his buddies, forgot that he also had the most gruesome and brutal killscenes of any of the heroes.

Nice work Bradley Cooper, Rocket was awesome.

Nice work Benicio del Toro.

Marvel villains still suck.

The action scenes sucked.

Haha Cosmo.

Haha Howard Duck.

Okay I thought I wouldn’t compare it to the Guardians of the Galaxy comics, but it’s important I bring it up a bit. Sad that they didn’t introduce Mantis (psychic), Phyla-Vell (superwoman-like), Adam Warlock (space magician), pretty much any of the more interesting, colourful characters of the modern GotG series – and I also missed the zany, time-space-universe bending plots that GotG got up to that the more staid Avengers and standard superhero stories didn’t want to touch. Stuff like time-traveling to parallel universes and whatnot.

Instead, this movie was your standard space-but-not-really adventure with aliens-but-actually-just-humans-with-different-skin-colors against interchangeable-space-villain-with-creepy-make-up, and space could actually be land, and at the end, an Earth-like planet was in trouble. I mean Guardians of the Galaxy was about saving the universe, not just a singular planet, right? The ending was pretty much the same last-minute-Hail-Mary-play-by-heroes trope that Avengers used. Bah.

In Sniper Elite V2, sniping people is as satisfying as popping bubble wrap. Sometimes, you might miss a bubble because you have to account for things like bullet drop, wind direction, air in lungs, etc. It’s not that the game is hyper-realistic, but it gave the illusion of “realism” enough that you felt good as you popped all the bubbles as if you were a professional bubble popper.

Sometimes when you pop the bubbles, you get to see inside the bubbles, and the trajectory of your bullet as it shatters ribs/skull/arms/legs/balls. It felt like those “cutaway anatomy” science books that I used to love reading as a kid.

I liked how hyper-focused this game was on popping bubble wrap, that trying to run-and-gun it like it was Call of Duty would be the fastest way to get yourself killed. The machine gun and Welrod silenced pistol are very hard to use because of how inaccurate they were made to be, so you were always forced to rely on your sniper rifle. And it was cool that you could lay traps like tripwire and mines for the bubbles. This is good restrictive game design.

The bubbles were really dumb most of the time but that didn’t stop it being fun to pop them.

What’s even better, is if you popped bubbles with a friend. Sometimes you’d coordinate it such that your friend would flank the bubble wrap, throw a grenade in to distract the bubbles, and then you’d storm in from the other side and pop them all. Sometimes you’d coordinate popping bubbles simultaneously or compete to see who could pop the bubble that was furthest away.

But most of the time, it was slowly creeping around corners, crawling in destroyed ruins, covering each other’s backs and popping bubbles across war-torn Europe together that was most fun. Sometimes the bubbles would fight back, and it’d be challenging, but we managed to finish the whole game co-op.

Telltale Games’ The Wolf Among Us is like a competent murder mystery drama TV show. It’s got enough in place to make it intriguing, but it couldn’t really be called edge-of-your-seat stuff. The mystery isn’t really the centerpiece anyway, it doesn’t matter whodunit – where it excels are the characters involved in this “world” like the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Bluebeard, the Tweedle bros, the Little Mermaid and other such familiar children’s stories characters. That’s cool. It’s like if you wanted to know what happened to Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk after that adventure was over – well, he became a low-life grifter. Everyone in this world is either sour or douchey.

The story is atmospherically dark, gritty, and violent, and sometimes a character would say “Fuck” or rip off someone else’s arm and I would go, “Whoa, this is atmospherically dark, gritty and violent”. For a cel-shaded cartoon-esque game that is. The artwork is tight though – dig those opening credits, man. The controls feel a bit janky at times, especially walking around in the world, but the clicking stuff is alright.

As this is an adventure game with multiple paths, you get choices. The choices are not bad, you get to say some cool stuff, but for the most part, this is a self-contained story so the outcome at the end of the five episodes is not a groundbreaking gamechanger, just some “I learnt some deep shit about the characters of this world and myself”, and a “nice job Telltale Games for bringing the Fables series to life.” The final “puzzle” to the mystery at the end of the final episode feels a bit confusing and throwaway though.

Look, The Walking Dead Season 1 is the best shit ever for a reason (and won Game of the Year – which I predicted). The story was crazy good, it didn’t use characters from the main canon series, so Telltale Games could fuck ‘em up if they wanted to. And then your choices in that game had deep implications moving forward into Season 2. The Wolf Among Us had to be a self-contained story because it is supposedly a prequel to the comics series.

But you should play this game because 1) it is better than a lot of the other shit out there 2) the Fables world is cool, and 3) Telltale Games is legit.

Gareth Evans knows his kungfu. Gareth Evans was very meticulous with the use of whooshes in the film each time a fist or foot or head connected with another body part. Whoosh. Whoosh. That made the kungfu more kungfu-ey. It looked like the actors and kungfu people were really in love with the way they moved, that it looked like a supremely choreographed dance, more than a dirty brawl. That’s good.

I don’t have much to say of the plot, it’s very Takeshi Kitano in its gangster trappings. That means to say it’s very Asian gangster-y, though am not sure why there had to be Japanese yakuza in Indonesia but I guess Gareth Evans knows more about that than I do anyway. I like that there were colorful assassins for our main hero to beat up, including a chick in shades wielding two unwieldy hammers – and that final fight – that is worth the ticket admission alone. By the way, there’s gratuitous violence. I also like that Gareth Evans was also messing about with the framing and composition of his shots, some looked dope. Pushing his capabilities is good.

The Raid 2 is a different beast from The Raid. Didn’t get me overly giddy with excitement and thrill as the first one did, and the plodding story bits just made me want for it to get on to the next fight scene, and the next. But it is still one of the best kungfu movies ever. If I was hosting a cool hang out at my cool home one cool night with some cool friends, I might turn to them and say “Hey, wanna’ see a cool action movie?” They’d be a bit bored of the story bits, but they’d ooh and ahh with the fighting.

Stand together or face extinction. As in the end of the Transformers franchise with this drivel.

I spent a lot of the movie wanting to leave. But my friend was asleep and he said that we should just try and survive it. But he got to sleep and I couldn’t, so I had to balk every 2 seconds at the shittiness that was flying off the screen.

Anyway, if you want to waste almost 3 hours of your life go ahead. A lot is wrong with the film, most of the plot is incoherent, it feels like Michael Bay himself doesn’t give a shit about Transformers anymore, because he’s got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now. I also wonder why he bothered to make this when Pain and Gain was so good. Marky mark was also reading through his lines really fast, like he only had one expression: out of breath deadbeat dad. I’m starting to think Marky mark thinks that if he wants to get dramatic and angry at someone in a movie, he must read his lines at them really fast.

“I ain’t got time for you, see how exasperated I am? This is my exasperated voice.”

There’s also Steve Jobs, a really-too-young-to-be CEO Chinese chick who also happens to know kungfu, two dead weight characters (Marky mark’s daughter and her Irish boyfriend), the worst use of Ken Watanabe and John Goodman ever, Optimus Prime kills Kelsey Grammar, rides a T-Rex, and proceeds to fly into outer space signifying the mind-blowing end to a shitty film. Optimus himself hates humans for pretty much most of the film, so I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of there.

Finally caught Frozen on the plane. It’s aight. Overrated to be frank. Thought that Anna had all the character development while Elsa had none. I managed to hold off from hearing Let It Go this whole time, and when it finally got played, I was like “meh”, there are better composed musical centerpieces out there. Lots of people travelling up the mountain for not much to happen, and then for them all to come back down the mountain again. Why couldn’t they have just had everything take place on the mountain when everyone made the trip up?

I get that this is a slight tweak on the Disney formula – yeah the handsome prince may not necessarily be all that good, but come on, Anna still had to end up with someone at the end did she? Couldn’t the sisters just like fuck off and do their own thing since they discovered their true love was the strongest? Anyway, the sister act wasn’t all that convincing.

Gone Home is a game that you should play. There you go, that’s my review of it. There’s really nothing else quite like it right now, it’s a highly refreshing experience. It doesn’t have any guns, macho military men, explosions, or cutscenes with overblown dramatic plots. It’s just you in a big old house – uncovering a quietly moving story.

I tried writing a lengthy review of this game but changed my mind, it didn’t really need one. If you’re undecided as to whether you should play it though, I’ll say this: It has really nice first-person controls with real-world physics that make you feel more immersed in the very detailed, realistic home setting. I would consider it a nice palate cleanser to all the bombastic triple-A titles today. It feels like Myst, if Myst wasn’t weird, abstract, didn’t have any puzzles and just a wonderful, surprising playthrough all the time. Take what you will from that.

There is however one thing I would like to talk about though, but it’s only worthwhile for you to read this after you’ve finished the game. Not only because there will be spoilers, but also because you wouldn’t understand what I’m talking about anyway. So go, shoo, play the game, and then come back later!

A very specific type of horror game is making a comeback these days – it started with Amnesia, and then along came titles like Slender and Outlast. The kind where you’re alone, with nothing more than a flashlight stalking through scary environments, waiting for some unseen monster to jump out at you.

Gone Home’s arrival during this survival horror revival could not be timelier because at the start, the game plays like a horror game. The house you return to from an extended trip abroad is deserted and in darkness. It doesn’t help that a stormy night heralds your return. There is the faint sound of a clock ticking somewhere. You turn on the answering machine and there’s a woman crying, pleading. Your immediate compulsion with entering rooms for the first time is to find the light switch. The family portrait looks a bit weird. And while rummaging through drawers and cabinets for papers and diaries, you’ll peek over your shoulder once in awhile just to make sure there’s nothing hovering right behind you.

Oh man, and what about that one bit where the light bulb in the basement shatters? I dashed out of there as quickly as I could. And yet nothing ever happened, no monster ever jumped out at me.

And that’s the point – the fear you feel when you play Gone Home is purely a construction of your mind, a figment of your imagination. Sure, the game doesn’t help lessen that tension, in fact, it exacerbates it by telling you stories about how your sister playfully messes around with an Ouija board (which you find later) trying to conjure up the dead spirit that supposedly haunts the corridors of this great old house.

But because my lizard brain kept thinking of the game as a horror title, I was just expecting a jump scare at every turn. But none ever came. Instead, all you’d get is a heartwarming story of a girl’s coming of age.

There was an article written recently about how there were some people who played the game who were unaffected by its horror-like atmosphere, who didn’t see it at all as a scary game. I think this dissonant-horror element only works for those who’ve been conditioned to play a game about a deserted mystery house and expects something to pop out. Then again, I would feel just as scared walking through a deserted house on a stormy night in real life anyway.

The best thing about this game for me is how the horror gives you a framework through which to view the house at the start, and that perception changes over time. When you begin the game for the first time, the house appears strange and foreign. You peer around corners, prick your ears at the slightest sounds of disturbance, and shudder at the possibility of a tormented spirit roaming the hallways.

The more you learn about the family that lived out their lives here, the more your sister’s story unfolds, and the more empathy you feel for her, the less threatening the house becomes. Soon, that Mexican skull sitting on the shelf doesn’t look very scary, and wandering into your sister’s spirit conjuring circle with the framed picture of your dead gran-uncle isn’t as bad as you expected it to be. And that red-lit doorway into the attic is not a gateway to hell, it’s the welcomed final chapter to a beautifully told story, with the happy ending you’ve been waiting for this whole time.

In a few days time, the godfather of open world games, Grand Theft Auto V launches. When it does, it will overshadow anything and everything that has come before, including the recently released Saints Row IV which I think is a shame, because SRIV is an awesome open world game in its own right.

So before that other game descends upon us, let me do this game justice and tell you why you should even bother with SRIV in the light of GTA V’s impending arrival.

I’ll say outright now that I’ve not played the first couple of Saints Row games, and dabbled lightly in The Third (as it is actually called) before getting on with SRIV. So why did I end up playing the fourth part of an open-world game franchise I had little interest in (and you don’t need to have played any of the previous ones to jump in either)?

Well, I’d say this insane trailer had something to do with it.

Saints Row has always been about giving you free reins to let loose in an entire city. Carjacking, clotheslining random people on the streets, exploding things, to name a few. Yes could do those things in GTA too, but the difference here is that while GTA continues down its crime-capering film-influenced dark path, Saints Row never once took itself seriously, always referencing not just GTA and other similar open world titles, but also the entire history of games and always upping the ante of crazy – from character customizations of epic proportions (like running around fat and naked with a dildo bat) to over the top scenarios like aliens invading, taking part in Japanese death-dealing gameshows, virtual reality simulators, to name a few.

So what is Saints Row IV?

Saints Row IV is superpowers. Let me explain.

You’re the President of the United States for all of five minutes when suddenly aliens invade, essentially destroying all of Earth and remaking (a part of) it in a virtual reality simulator. You decide to take revenge by hacking the system, and giving yourself the superpowers necessary to beat the evil head honcho alien. And that’s just the beginning.

While GTA does its hyper-realism thing, Saints Row went down the opposite end of the scale. In the opening mission, you’re climbing a nuke trying to disarm it to the sweet sounds of Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. Soon you’ll be punching murderous toilet bowls, shooting rockets at a giant killer soda can mascot, playing a telekinesis game of throwing people through hoops, engaging in a text-based adventure, blowing up tanks in a Tron-esque world, uppercutting 2D enemies in a side-scrolling beat-em-up, sneaking around under crates Metal Gear Solid style, mindlessly (and very self-aware of that fact) running and gunning down drab corridors Call-of-Duty-esque, or duking it out in a fight club for superpowered people. Listen, if you just love games, there will be some referential joke in here that is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, if not make you jump out and down in excitement and glee like I did.

The overarching story does a decent job of keeping you invested – your character is a cool dude or chick who doesn’t give any fucks, drops cool lines, and does right by his or her crew. Basically the aliens have abducted your entire Cabinet of Ministers and you’ve got to go rescue everyone before taking the fight to the big boss. Every character you meet is interesting, with enough personality to make the relationship dynamics that play out funky. Not once does the game devolve into unnecessary melodrama, but in the moments when it does get serious and heartfelt, you feel like the game’s deserved it.

You even get to explore a spaceship ala Mass Effect style in between missions, and unlike that Bioware game, you only need to press R to romance people and get on with the sexy times immediately. Actual sex between characters happens off-screen unfortunately, but hey, at least you don’t have to waste time schmoozing them with talk and presents. You get right to the fucking, that’s all players want.

And that’s true for the entire game – at no point does it feel like shit is being held back from you. You bought this game, now you want to play it, and play it you can. I’m only about 50% through the entire game but I’ve clocked up 20 hours play-time because there’s so much to do. If you get too bored of just flying around the entire city beating up hapless innocent passerbys and running everywhere at top speeds, rendering both vehicular transportation and guns obsolete (although you can still use those things if you want), you can do any one of the many gazillion side missions that your allies have for you. Essentially a lot of them are just dressed up variations of go here, kill X number of bad guys, or hack that computer terminal, drive that vehicle, destroy X amount of things, but the rush of being a superpowered agent of chaos never gets old. And you are given absolute license to cause as much mayhem as you can. In this regard, the game feels like an MMO, but it never gets grindy, because gaining levels is not the goal of this game although doing more missions gets you more money and XP to spend on superpowers, buffs, equipment, etc.

I’ve spent hours just running around town at top speeds and then pressing right click at the right time to execute a finishing move on passerbys on the street. Flip up a grandma in the air and kick her right in the spine. Or jump on the head of a hobo. Or throw a douche business man against a wall. Running people over in cars or shooting them dead is no longer cool when you can have all the superpowers. I am seriously concerned that SRIV might spoil me when GTA V comes out.

While GTA V will probably rock our pants off metaphorically, Saints Row IV is doing it literally just because you can’t stop jiving along to the great dubstep soundtrack and in-game radio stations. Whenever you finish a mission, the game drops a great dubstep track that makes you feel fist-pumpingly awesome, and to me that’s all any gamer wants as a reward for a job well done.

And co-op enhances the fun by fifty billion percent, because unless your co-op partner is a party-pooper, the added bonus of having someone to experience the insanity of this game alongside you, and laughing together as you run around town blowing up shit can never be replicated in any of the serious machoistic posturing of your Battlefields and Call of Duties.

My only criticism of the game is that the city does feel a little soulless; it is not in any way geographically interesting, merely a playground for destruction. There is no one place worth stopping at to check out or to hang out in, just a lot of non-descript shops, apartment buildings, suburban houses, and skyscrapers to pass by on your way to your next ridiculous task. The only buildings you can enter are the ones for customizing your weapons, clothes, cars, etc.

Also there will be sections where you can’t avoid shooting, and even a brief spell or two when they take away your powers. It’s not a problem, but the shooting feels very floaty and not at all impactful – a total contrast to how awesome it feels to punching someone really hard and watching them fly a good distance away. Maybe that’s the devs’ intention, to encourage you to punch things in the game more.

The alien thing gets a bit grating sometimes, but the story makes them out to be the annoying villains that they are, so shooting them to death and beating their faces in feels like something you’d really want to do anyway.

Aside from these few niggles, this is a game that just gets it. Sometimes we don’t want the over-blown dramatic sob story of heroic feats of sacrifice and world-saving. We just want to get on with doing the cool stuff. Sometimes we don’t want to work so hard to unlock a few powers. We just want those powers now. Sometimes we don’t want to do what the game is asking us. So we just take a mega spaceship and blast all the shit to kingdom come. If you ever had those thoughts while playing other games, then Saints Row IV is happy to be your funtime mistress.